the evolution to multi-site
// July 1st, 2008 // church, multi-site
This is sort of a part 2 to yesterdays post about One Prayer. I wanted to share one other way that this series has been so great for us. One Prayer has been an awesome way to get our peeps ready for video sermons. We’ve been talking about going multi-site for a while now (read more here), so this has been a great way to introduce them to video pastor. And the response has been so much better than I expected. They reacted no different than if the speaker were live, they laughed out loud (especially with Perry), the would say their typical ‘amens,’ and they bowed their heads when the speakers prayed. Which is exactly what we were hoping would happen.
Our next step in evolving into a multi-site church is to start one video service at our current location. Our plan as of now will be to record Saturday nights message and then roll it during any one of our Sunday morning services, and the fun thing is that we are going to keep it random. We’re doing this for a few reasons:
- 1. Our auditorium only seats 500, and every seat is within 75 ft of the stage, so iMag has never been needed, it may would even be more of a distraction (and that totally misses the point of iMag). So our people aren’t used to watching the screens as they are in so many other churches, so rolling it on Sundays gets them used to it and hopefully makes it a little easier to transition them to a video campus (our goal is have 200 or so commit to helping us launch our first off-site campus).
- 2. We’re keeping it random so we can introduce it to everyone, not just one service or group of folks. We’re sharing the love man! And hopefully it will kill the negative preconceived notions that a lot of people may have, you know the ones that have never experienced it but will still complain and point out every reason why it won’t work. Those people are so much fun.
- 3. The last reason is to give our Pastor a break. He’s been preaching 4 services a weekend for over a year now. To keep him from burnout, we feel its a necessity to introduce a video message in one service a weekend.
For the most part these are initial ideas, we’ve still got a lot of planning and learning to do before we truly get a lock on whats gonna be going down.
I’d love to hear your thoughts, especially you guys out there that may be in a multi-site church or planning to go multi-site… give me yo wisdom!
